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Babies' Cries Less Likely to Bother a Man than a Woman

by Sharon Mazel on May 08, 2013

Sharon Mazel

About the Author

Sharon Mazel is a journalist and mom to four girls. She works with Heidi Murkoff on her What To Expect book series and has written for The Washington Post, Parenting Magazine, Baby Talk Magazine, and of course, WhatToExpect.com. Before becoming a mom she was a TV writer and producer at NBC News, FOX News, and WPIX-NY.

About the Blog

WhatToExpect.com supports Word of Mom as a place to share stories and highlight the many perspectives and experiences of pregnancy and parenting. However, the opinions expressed in this section are those of individual writers and do not reflect the views of Heidi Murkoff of the What to Expect brand.

Science has confirmed what most moms have long suspected: Women's brains respond differently than men's when they hear the cries of a hungry infant. Researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that a baby's cry abruptly raises a woman's state of attention, while men's brains remain in a resting state even when they hear an infant wail.

Previous studies have shown that men and women respond differently to the sound of an infant's cry on an emotional level (women are more likely than men to feel sympathy when they hear a baby cry... and are more compelled than men to want to care for a crying infant), but these new findings suggest that they also respond differently in terms of snapping to attention.

For their small study published in the journal Neuroreport, researchers asked 18 men and women — both parents and non-parents — to let their minds wander. Then the scientists took brain scans of the study participants as recordings of white noise mixed with a hungy infant's cries were played. In women, brain activity quickly switched over to attentive mode as soon as they heard the cries. That wasn't the case for men, whose brains stayed in a resting state (which could explain why dads often sleep through those middle of the night cries while moms are instantly awakened!).

Interestingly, while brain activity patterns differed between men and women, there was no difference in the brain patterns between parents and non-parents. This could suggest that women are biologically wired to care for infants even if they are not the mother, say researchers.

The researchers also played the cries of infants who were later diagnosed with autism. A previous study found that the screams of babies who are later diagnosed as having autism tend to be higher pitched than those of other babies and that the pauses between cries are shorter. In this study, both men and women responded by becoming more attentive when they heard the cries of babies later diagnosed with autism.